The economic facilities are quite different from each other...
You've got:
- The inefficient but "free to build and maintain" subsistence ones.
- The cheap, normal facilities that take more investment, but produce more resources by planet value.
- The solar-based facilities which are good in binary or trinary systems.
- The expensive facilities which produce lots by planet value if you can afford them.
- The expensive facilities which produce only moderate amounts, but independent of planet value.
- And some facilities which "burn" one resource to generate another, much like an automatic resource converter.
The Hydrocarbon power plant is a perfect example... burns organics to produce energy/rads.